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Making a turntable's platter spin at exactly 33¹/₃ rotations per minute sounds like it should be an easy task, but in fact it's hard to do precisely. Just getting the platter to turn is easy enough, but there are two forces trying to stop the platter that you need to overcome: friction from the bearing that supports the platter, and friction from the stylus riding in the groove.

Forget the slick 1970s country-folk rock of the Eagles, America, or Pure Prairie League. The Band was the real deal. Their sound—a blend of Appalachian folk, Cajun, blues, rock'n'roll, country, and R&B—was earned in the trenches, gigging through the rural South and learning the ropes from the masters of that music.

The quest to review the Pearl Acoustics Model One began at the 2025 Montreal Audiofest. It was there I crossed paths in a hallway with Galion Audio's Thomas Tan. "Rob! Rob!" he called out through a stream of visitors between us. "You have to hear my TS A20 power amp driving Pearl Acoustics speakers!"

When I began writing for Stereophile in 2014, I decided not to mention Audio Note. I decided this because during the best part of the 1990s, I enthusiastically represented both Audio Note UK and Audio Note Japan (Kondo). I did not want my new readers thinking my Stereophile review stories were biased by my previous affiliations.

EISA, or the Expert Imaging and Sound Association, is an organization representing 53 of the most respected special interest publications and websites from 26 countries that cover Hi-Fi, Home Theater, Photography, Mobile Devices, and In-Car Electronics. Every year EISA's Expert Group members, including editors from this publication, test a very wide range of new products from their field of expertise before comparing results and voting to decide on the cream of every product category.

Those of us who like to listen to music at room-filling scale may worry when we sit between a pair of standmount speakers. Sure, many of us have heard remarkably large and expansive sound from relatively smallish boxes . . . But it's always a crapshoot. Will that little two-way speaker excite my blood to musical ecstasy or boil it in frustration?